I'm tired of dealing with wedding plans that mushroom out of control.
I'm tired of people trying to pass the blame.
I'm tired of careless drivers who yak on their cellphones, weaving in and out of lanes, not using their turn signals when they change lanes, and leaving them on when they don't.
I'm tired of control freaks at work who think it's their job to tell others what they can't do.
I'm tired of excuses.

According to their website, the 7-Eleven company has 385 stores in the United States.

For comparison, there are 8,924 in Japan and 2,908 in Taiwan.

I find this somewhat amusing and disturbing.

... I toured these townhouses today, and they're nice. Right on the Allegheny. Five minute drive to work, 30 minute walk.

$300k, though? I think that's a tad high, and I don't think I'd enjoy paying a $2400 mortgage every month.

I'm unhappy when a release build is horked.

I'm downright pissed when I'm the one responsible.

The final numbers aren't in yet, but it looks like the stock markets will close very nearly unchanged. I guess a lot of other people had the same idea I had.

I did put in a buy order for 100 shares of WorldCom at 10c, but they stopped trading on it before the markets even opened. Ah, well.

I'm beginning to see why some stockbrokers jump out windows when the market crashes. (No, no, I'm nowhere near that mindset, don't worry. :-).

It's disheartening to see your hard-earned nest-egg vanish so easily. I've been watching non-trivial amounts of money vanish every day now for the last five weeks or so. Despite spending no money and working ten hours, I end up poorer when the sun sets.

Of course, you have to keep in mind that it works both ways. During boom times, I can sit and home on my lazy butt and make money.

In related news, I'm none too happy about WorldCom misplacing $3.8 billion dollars. That's not going to be good for the market tomorrow. (On the other hand, I already have my buy order in place for the index fund I invest in, so... :-)

Hm. The light fixture above my desk is flickering, and the wires are hot.

It doesn't take my EE skills to figure out that this is A Bad Thing™.

Is there any way to get objective information about what Arafat really does? Some sources claim that he supports terror, others say that the terror attacks are not connected to him, and still others are mum on the issue.

It seems that the informed sources, when it comes to the Middle East, are anything but unbiased. I'll have to resign myself to continued skepticism on the reporting on this issue.

I am so sore. But quite happy.

Just got back from a weekend trip to a cottage out near Ligonier. Went swimming last night and this morning in a pool/pond (constantly getting fresh stream water, and has all kinds of random fish in it). Given that I don't usually swim and don't get as much exercise as I should, I will be sore tomorrow. Eh.

Also had lunch with Tam and Alli (Tam's friend whose family owns the cottage) at the Ligonier Tavern (which was a surprisingly good restaurant).

Happy Birthday, Carn!

I think we're about to be bought by Cadence.

We got a strange e-mail from our HR director/VP of Finance regarding stock options, and how, from time to time, we should evaluate whether we should exercise our options and purchase stock. I thought nothing of it at the time.

This morning, however, Cadence sent out a press release regarding a customer success with NeoCell, one of our products (Cadence markets and sells NeoCell). In this press release, there is not a single mention of Neolinear, and no mention of NeoCell being a registered Neolinear trademark. Management is brushing this off as an oversight. In my experience, though, marketing droids tend to be obsessive about making notes about trademarks.

I don't want to work for Cadence. They tend to squash any innovative ideas, internally. Their turnover rate is abysmal -- most of their good coders left.

scaryr: I don't trust sushi at all
scaryr: It's got a real mean streak.
kangadac: If it's mean, um... that's not right.
kangadac: It's raw, yes, but not *alive*.
scaryr: I still don't trust it.
scaryr: Sushi betrayed my great-uncle, actually.
kangadac: How so?
scaryr: Sold him to the Russians for a piece of tin.
kangadac: You sure you haven't been hitting the liquor cabinet?

Woohoo! Tamara () now has a LiveJournal!

Hm. This means I can get in trouble on here now... :-)

Just started a new LJ community. Hop on over to Questionable eBay Items.

Happiness is...

A box of Barnum's Animal Crackers and Irish creme coffee.

Science Fair Volcanoes...

...had nothing on me last night.

Tamara got me a root beer kit for my birthday last December, and I finally got around to starting a batch a couple weekends ago. We tried some on Sunday. It was awful. I think I didn't put enough sugar in, and the yeast started fermenting.

I decided to rectify this last night. I opened the bottle, put a funnel in, and started pouring sugar in.

Instant 4-foot geyser. Root beer *everywhere*. One girlfriend rolling on the floor, unable to stop laughing.

So, yeah. That was one pissed off colony of yeast. I'll have the last laugh yet, though, when I enjoy my root beer.

---

In other ponderables -- why is nearly *everyone* on my LJ friends list depressed? *Hugs* from Tam and myself. Cheer up!

Just after I got MorningGloryCam running and stable, my other computer (the one I usually use for e-mail and such) dies.

Fortunately, it's fixable. A voltage regulator chip was not glued to the board properly, and time and heat caused it to lift right off (and relocate itself at an odd angle). Unfortunately, I don't have the proper tools for this. As a result, DigiKey is now a few hundred dollars richer at my expense.

I'll be spending my time on this computer until Thursday or so.

Because n webcams aren't enough.

My plants get no privacy.

MorningGloryCam

This is entirely too cute.

Thanks to for providing this.

Fear the cuteness.

Well, it seems that CowbellTiara is a personal project by professional artist Akitu Taira. Pero, one of my office mates, translated the pages for me.

My boss is out of town next week, so that means I can show up to work anytime I want. Wait. I already do that. Hrm.

Oh, and it looks like CORBA won out. Time to dust off the CORBA books.

First, does anyone know what CowbellTiara is? I love the pictures I've seen from that page. Unfortunately, all of the information is in Japanese. (Hm, maybe I can get Pero to translate for me...)

---

Secondly, I've become the inadvertent sysadmin.

We have a ~1 terabyte directory, /zone, in which quotas are not enforced. So I've been dumping a lot of useful utilities into /zone/dacut. However, some of the soon-to-be-released items I'm working on are starting to rely on said utilities. Having software builds depend on the state of a user's directory is a no-no!

As a result, I started moving various items into their own directories. Then people started coming by. "Dave, do you know why {gcc,makeinfo,mozilla,etc.} isn't working?"

Heh. Turns out that word has gotten out that having /zone/dacut in your path is a useful thing.

Well, I'm spending the day recompiling stuff into proper directories. They needed to be updated, anyway. And the system I had for doing so was unmanageable. Some good will come out of this.

Hm. I desperately need to fix this ad-hoc RPC* mechanism I've created with something more standardised. The only problem is which standard?

There's CORBA, SOAP, DCOM, RMI, SunRPC, etc., which all have their pluses and minuses. The problem is that each one has what appears to be a fatal negative for this project. Grr.

*RPC = remote procedure call. This allows parts of a program to run on a different machine in a way that is (ideally) transparent to the programmer.

Troublemaker

Today is timecard day. I hate timecard day.

Well, I used to. You see, we fill out our timecards using a web application. Each time you submit an entry, it takes about 10-20 seconds for the server to process. There are at least three entries per day (clock in time, clock out time, and then you bill your time to one or more projects). This means that it takes upwards of an hour to fill out the timecard.

Since all my time is billed to DARPA, anyway, I have since written a script which automatically fills out the timecard for me. Even better, it randomizes the start and stop times slightly, filling in between 9 and 10 hours (which is reasonably accurate for the time I spend here -- anything past 8 is ignored, anyway, since I'm an exempt employee, so...).

So they do flip coins.

Here's how the National Weather Service has created this week's forecast for Pittsburgh:

AREA FORECAST DISCUSSION
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PITTSBURGH PA
335 PM EDT SUN JUN 2 2002

IN THE FACE OF RECENT MODEL DISPARITIES...OPTED TO GO MORE THE ETA 
RUN FOR DAYS 1-2 THEN AVN FOR DAYS 3-4 AND MRFX AND RELATED 
ENSEMBLES FOR DAYS 5-7.

ETA HAS MIDWEST SYSTEM MOVING EASTWARD ALONG WARM FRONT AND 
AFFECTING THE HEAD OF THE OHIO REGION MONDAY...PERHAPS NOT TIL 
AFTERNOON FOR WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA AND NORTHERN WEST VIRGINIA. 
TEMPERATURES WILL STRUGGLE TO MAKE THE UPPER 60S. CONCUR WITH HPC 
THINKING THAT THERE MAY BE HEAVY THUNDERSTORM RAINFALL MONDAY 
NIGHT...CONSIDERING THE INCREASE IN MOISTURE AND LIFT WITH THE 
NORTHWARD MOVING WARM FRONT. THE AVERAGE RAINFALL IN MANY BASINS 
SHOULD EXCEED 1 INCH. 

ON TUESDAY...ETA HAS THE HEAD OF THE OHIO REGION IN THE WARM 
SECTOR...WITH HUMID CONDITIONS. THE ETA AND AVN SHOW AT LEAST TWO 
SMALLER SCALE SOURCES OF LIFT MOVING THROUGH THE REGION THEN. 
DIURNALLY THE BEST OPPORTUNITY FOR THUNDERSTORMS WILL BE AFTERNOON 
AND EARLY EVENING. 

THE AVN THEN SHOWS THE SPLIT UPPER FLOW OUT WEST DEVELOPING AN UPPER 
LEVEL TROUGH IN THE MIDWEST. THE OPERATIONAL MRF SHOWS THE DEEPEST 
DEVELOPMENT OF THIS SYSTEM WITH A CUTOFF BY THURSDAY. HOWEVER THIS 
IS AN ENSEMBLE OUTLIER...AND USING HPC THINKING FROM RECENT 
DISCUSSIONS...WENT WITH THE MRFX AND THE GENERAL LOCUS OF ENSEMBLE 
SOLUTIONS...THAT SHOWED THE MIDWEEK MIDWEST TROUGH PROGRESSING 
EASTWARD TO THE EAST COAST THIS WEEKEND. THIS WAS LIKEWISE SUPPORTED 
BY THIS MORNINGS AVN RUN. SO KEPT SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS FOR 
WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY...BUT THEN WENT TO DRY CONDITIONS FOR FRIDAY 
AND THE WEEKEND. 

FOR TEMPERATURES...WENT CLOSER TO ETA MOS FOR MONDAYS HIGHS...A 
BLEND OF ETA AVN AND NGM MOS FOR TUESDAY...AND MRF ENSEMBLE MEANS 
MOS FOR DAYS 4-7. ...GIORDANO